Free B0046ZREEU EBOK by Margaret Elphinstone

you look up, just for a moment?
    Your eyes are the colour of my son’s.
    We set sail from Breidavik at the beginning of May.
    Everything seemed to augur well. Several of my father’s tenants and freedmen chose to come with us, as well as the slaves he picked to remain with us. Three of the tenants brought their families. The slaves were mostly couples. One useful thing my father did teach me is that it’s a good idea to allow your dependants to marry and to bring up loyal families. It’s not only an insurance for the next generation, it’s also that marriage keeps men contented in your service. I wish thesame could be said of free men, but I never noticed a warrior being subdued by domestic influences. You must know a bull is safer in with the cows, not tethered away from the herd, but then you haven’t had to trouble yourself with livestock.
    The best of it, as it seemed to me that blue May morning, was that Orm and Halldis were with us too. As soon as they heard the news that we were going, Halldis came to my father and begged the forgiveness for Orm that Orm would never have asked for himself, and asked that they might join the expedition. ‘Gudrid and I haven’t been separated until this winter, since she was five years old,’ she said. ‘You know you’ll need a woman to keep her company. You don’t want some young maid who’ll look out for nothing except a man for herself. You want a mother for her. Think of all those young men there must be by now in the Green Land who need wives. Eirik Raudi had three young sons when he went away. What wives can they have found among the seals and rocks? That’s what it’s like in a new country. You’ll have to watch out for her, and if you’re careful, you may marry her very well.’ Halldis knew my father; kinship with Eirik Raudi was a bait he wouldn’t fail to snap at. Halldis didn’t mention, of course, that I wasn’t much of a prize since my father had given away what would have been my dowry. The despised Einar was probably ten times as rich as my father now. But she did mention to me privately that I’d probably make a better match in Greenland, where women were scarce. Land was there for the taking; no need to marry into it out there, but a woman to run the estate once you’d got it … As Halldis said, I was healthy and knew about good husbandry. ‘Management and babies,’ she said to me, when we were allowed to meet again. ‘That’s what men will want out there. They won’t despise beauty either, in a wild country. I don’t think you need worry too much about that dowry.’
    She persuaded my father, and maybe it was she who sowed the first seed of an idea about my future. Maybe he had thought of it already. I shall never know, but Eirik’s sons were certainly considered as a possibility in my family before ever I laid eyes on any of them. I wasn’t unwilling. I still had the memory of a fierce red man, telling us his dream of a new country, while he stood in our hall blocking off thefirelight, so that his shadow multiplied into huge shapes on the wall behind him.
    I don’t think Orm wanted to go to Greenland. Naturally he was anxious about what would happen to his lands when Laugarbrekka was sold to an unknown buyer. Maybe he thought a journey to the Green Land was the lesser risk. He didn’t come for love of me as Halldis did, but I think he came for love of her.
    Before I was baptised Thangbrand the missionary explained to us about judgement. Even now I have dreams about the end of the world. I suppose I should think of these things now more than ever – my own death can’t be far off – and yet, as I grow old, I come to hope more and more that God is merciful. In Iceland death is a small thing. Men must kill; it’s their nature. I think women are more haunted by the deaths that they inflict. For men, there’s still the dream of the last battle. They fear no judgement, only hope for the fight that will last until the end of the world.